…but chose to ignore.
*The Observer can reveal that Pakistani counter-terrorism officials warned their British counterparts about plans by militants to bomb London pubs, restaurants and possibly railway stations last May. *
**Terror hunt ‘to take decades’
· Senior police officers admit long-term failure to infiltrate Islamist extremists
· Top-level inquiry looms into intelligence operations
**
Gaby Hinsliff, David Rose, Martin Bright and Ned Temko
Sunday July 17, 2005
The Observer
Britain’s most senior police officers believe that it will ‘take decades’ to successfully tackle British Islamist terror networks because of a failure to penetrate extremists in the Muslim community.
Senior police sources have said that the current state of knowledge about Islamic terrorism is comparable to that gathered on the IRA in the early Seventies, when it struck almost with impunity.
Cabinet ministers are also known to share concerns that the government, the intelligence services and the police have failed to provide a ‘fundamental right’ to British people to live in a secure country.
The parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee is now expected to hold a top-level inquiry into possible intelligence failures in the run-up to the 7 July London bombings.
One senior anti-terrorist officer who spoke to The Observer said that by the Nineties the IRA was ‘completely penetrated’, which helped to force it to the negotiating table. ‘That wasn’t the case in the Seventies. We had very little idea about what they were going to do,’ he added.
‘Just as it did with the IRA, building up an effective intelligence network [on Islamist terrorism] is going to take many years, perhaps decades.’
**The Observer can reveal that Pakistani counter-terrorism officials warned their British counterparts about plans by militants to bomb London pubs, restaurants and possibly railway stations last May. **
**Interrogations of a Pakistan-born Briton, who was arrested by Pakistani authorities close to the border with Afghanistan that month, exposed the plot, which was supposed to be put into action in the early summer. **
**This claim will be embarrassing to UK authorities, already reeling from accusations that they failed to place under surveillance a key al-Qaeda operative who arrived in Britain a month before the London blasts. **
'At that time we received information from a number of sources and passed it on to the British, 'Aftab Sherpao, the Pakistani interior minister, told The Observer. Sherpao refused to discuss details of the intelligence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1530401,00.html
:rolleyes:
Now we know why the bombing drills were taking place at the same time.